I don’t know why you think that’s an argument. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state for 8 years, with no apparent cognitive functions and no prospect of improvement, before her husband / guardian petitioned to remove the feeding tube that kept her body alive. And she remained in that same state for another 7 years before permission was granted.
magnet
3759
There is a huge legal and physiological difference between a persistent vegetative state and brain death. When discussing the minimum requirement for “humanity”, it is potentially a significant difference. A zygote has no brain, therefore it is physiologically comparable to a brain dead individual. A later-term fetus has rudimentary brain function, which you could potentially compare to Schiavo’s capacities.
I brought it up because if you object to abortion even at the level of the zygote, then you should also object to harvesting organs from brain dead individuals. They are equally human.
Are you as resolute about caring for the health, safety, life of the actually born and living? That’s a sincere question, really. I’m not pro-life, but if I were I don’t think I could make it a litmus test, because my sense of the party of pro-life is that they believe all fetuses should be born and become suffering people. So I don’t think I would be able to vote at all.
Perhaps, but it isn’t clear to me. Schiavo in 2002 had severe cerebral atrophy and no signs of measurable brain activity at all. Was she brain dead, or just in a really severe persistent vegetative state? Did the difference matter to the Court of Appeals?
Yes, that’s a good point.
magnet
3762
She absolutely had brain activity. She could breathe on her own, for one thing. Breathing is controlled by the brain. She also moved her limbs, though seemingly aimlessly. Limb movement also requires the brain in most cases.
It’s quite possible that she had no cortical activity. Cortex is the higher part of the brain that is thought to be responsible for planning, communication, introspection, and possibly consciousness. But you can lose all cortical activity and have a functional midbrain and brainstem, in which case you are not brain dead.
The legal case surrounding Schiavo had nothing to do with her brain activity or her rights. People in a persistent vegetative state have the same rights as anyone else. It was purely a question who was authorized to make medical decisions for her.
Timex
3763
Yeah, Sciavo’s brain damage was largely the removal of central grey matter. The neo cortex actually still existed, but likely suffered damage that an adult could never recover from. But her brain was still doing things. Most of her autonomous functions controlled by her brain stem were unaffected. Whether she still was conscious of her environment? It’s probably impossible to say with any degree of certainty.
What we do know, however, is that people have actually recovered from similar brain injuries. Specifically, there was a child in Brittain who suffered from the same kind of hydroencephalus. In his case, he lost something like 85% of his brain mass, and doctors assumed that he would never have any kind of functional intelligence. Amazingly, the kid actually recovered, and was able to learn to speak, etc., to the extent that he seems amazingly normal. His brain actually rebuilt itself to a large degree.
Now, in that case, the kid had the advantage of am infants’ neuro plasticity and accelerated neurological development. An adult can’t recover from the same kind of damage… But after reading about that case, I’m less certain of Sciavo being entirely non conscious.
It’s a statement of the obvious to say that never-Trump Republicans don’t share the Democratic agenda, but it is worth repeating because it points to the basic flaw in the never-Trump argument about what Democrats should do in choosing a candidate.
Democrats want to elect a candidate who will e.g. try to enact universal health care with at minimum some form of public option and sufficient funding to address costs for low-income households[*].
Never-Trump Republicans want Democrats to elect someone who is not for such a program but instead is simply not Trump.
Never-Trump Republicans argue that Democrats should guarantee a ‘win’ by nominating someone not for universal health care. But if Democrats do that, they don’t get universal health care anyway, so they actually lose. In that scenario, only the never-Trump Republicans win, because they get a pseudo Republican, and Democrats get fuck all. The offer is, essentially, that Democrats could abandon the agenda they want, adopt the agenda of the never-Trumpers, and get…3 votes. Even if they win, they lose, and maybe they lose anyway.
Why should Democrats be convinced by that argument?
[*] This is just a single example of what Democrats have to get to ‘win’, for purposes of illustrating how bad the never-Trump bargain is.
Heard this Invisibilia podcast episode about brain stuff and thought it was pretty crazy:
RichVR
3766
One of my greatest fears next to four more years of Trump and slamming my balls in an airplane door.
magnet
3767
My greatest fear is four years of Trump slamming my balls in an airplane door. While I’m locked in.
RichVR
3768
Well… I would accept that as long as he wasn’t president.
Sorry about your balls though.
In the long lost spirit of bipartisan compromise, I propose we instead gather together and slam Trump’s balls in an airplane door for four years.
Not harsh enough. We need to salt the Earth so nothing that shitty ever grows again. So to speak.
RichVR
3771
I dunno. I think my disgust at seeing his balls and my absolute hate for him would end up in castration and bleeding out on the tarmac for him in the first slam. Sorry. Not sorry.
Matt_W
3772
While true, abortion is still, after 4 decades, the real 3rd rail in American politics. It, along with race, is the ever-present elephant in the room whenever we talk about U.S. national elections. Why do evangelicals reliably vote Republican? Because, for 40 years, they’ve been trying to alter the political composition of the Supreme Court in order to strike down Roe v Wade. And GOP strategists have, for 40 years, been promising them that. I grew up in that milieu; it really and truly is their principle political motivation, and is largely responsible for the current dysfunction of American politics. Without abortion, evangelicals would split like Catholics (i.e. you wouldn’t be able to statistically infer their political affiliation from their religious identification) and political pressure would probably have forced the GOP to be a fairly sane center-right party, kind of like the Democrats are now.
There is a thread for abortion debate, but it’s mostly non-contentious and not very active. I don’t think there’s any reasonable non-religious argument against early-term abortion, and @HighPlainsDrifter claimed to be able to offer one. I was intrigued by that, but ultimately not surprised that they couldn’t actually offer one nor explain how to resolve the moral conundrums that an absolutist anti-abortion position creates, which is part-and-parcel of the hoodwinking that the GOP has pulled over American voters’ eyes on this issue. It’s the GOP who convinced voters that the line should be drawn at conception, which is a completely unreasonable, extreme position. It’s why you now have Republican male politicians claiming that consensual rape doesn’t cause pregnancy. It’s why rapist Brett Kavanaugh is sitting on the Supreme Court. It’s why rapist Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office.
Democrats evince a wide spectrum of responses to the issue: from “should be allowed on demand without question” to “should be allowed, but with significant restriction.” They also support a wide variety of policies meant to mitigate the economic and social forces that lead to abortions. In our society all of that gets lumped under “pro-choice”, when in any rational society, we’d be able to talk about all of that as a wide spectrum of political options and moral beliefs.
Everything the candidates discuss on other issues is just waves on the surface of the wide ocean of abortion politics. Someone like @HighPlainsDrifter will never vote for a Democrat because of it, no matter how salutary every other policy the Democrat espouses might be to their values, no matter how despicable, corrupt and evil the opposing candidate is, even if policies espoused by the Democrat would result in fewer abortions. How do you fight that? You can’t. On that single issue, the GOP has won two generations of “conservative” voters and counting.
Timex
3773
This is also the position of many Republicans, but the thing is that the members of the GOP who are loudest on this issue, by far, are the evangelicals who hold absolutist views against abortion.
There are lots of Republicans, or at least used to be, who either don’t care as much about abortion as an issue, or have more moderate views. Many of those folks may be independents in the Trump era.
Which matters not at all, because it’s a hard plank of the party that all officials must be absolutist on the issue at all times or they get kicked out of the party.
Fuck them. Traitors, the lot of them.
Timex
3775
Eh, being against abortion doesn’t make you a traitor, dude.
It does make you a shitty person though!
Unlike all those aborted babies that never even had a chance to be people, much less shitty people.
